I see an awful lot of complaining about the addition of the ads in the feed for the default Steemit pages and to be honest I was a bit surprised when I saw them as well but I'm here to say that I think people should maybe just chill out a bit.
I am not going to get into the specifics as to why the ads appeared all of a sudden, but I would imagine, that this "feature" much like almost all changes that are made to almost anything, are because revenue generation is necessary in really any business that exists in the world.
To be honest, I don't really find them all that annoying because they are easily distinguished from actual posts and there is almost no chance I am going to ever click on them. Basically, i don't think they really interfere with the site all that much but again, I have not looked into the specifics of why they are there, or how they are targeted. I'm certain that they are targeted in a fashion similar to the ones I see on IG or FB because for the most part they are closely related to the kind of shopping that I do online anyway.
I get it, we all hate ads, but as ads go these are really not all that intrusive and to the people out there that are outraged that this is now happening, you have options such as Partiko and Busy that will not show the ads (I haven't actually used Busy but this is what I have heard.) For me, I hardly even notice they are there, once they start hijacking what I am doing or being pop-ups I think I will take issue with them, but for the time being, I think maybe we should all just calm down a little bit?
What do you think? Like I said I don't look into the specifics of any of this but I do realize that all businesses have to make money in order to remain solvent and if this tiny little addition in any way helps the platform to remain relevant or even to grow, then I am ok with it.